Little did Jewel know, the song she was most embarrassed by would become her biggest hit.
Chatting with fellow songwriters Madi Diaz and Jensen McRae in a video series for Elle recently, Jewel revealed she thought one her most popular songs was “the dumbest thing.”
“What’s funny is I hated ‘You Were Meant for Me’ when I wrote it. I thought it was the dumbest song I’d ever written,” she said. “I was really into, like, super lyrical, like more like ‘Who Will Save Your Soul,’ like really lyrically dense songs, and ‘You Were Meant For Me’ just seemed like the dumbest thing.”
The song was written in the very beginning of her career, before she became a household name. The Alaska native was actually homeless as a teen, singing in coffee shops and bars, and busking throughout the Pacific Northwest before she was discovered. “You Were Meant For Me” was featured on her debut album, ‘Pieces of You,’ in 1995. And while she didn’t have high expectations when it came to the song’s popularity, it peaked at No. 2 on the Billboard charts in 1997, according to Billboard.com.
“I was embarrassed every time I played it, people seemed to like it, and I remember just being like in such conflict, you know, and it was just wild,” she continued. “That song ended up just being this, you know, runaway thing, and sometimes you don’t know when you write them.
“I was just trying to do the most so much when I was young, you know, and you don’t learn till later that like simplicity actually takes a ton of refinement,” she added.
Related: Jewel, 51, Says She’s ‘Never Been Bored Singing’ Hit Song She Wrote at 16
Jewel also opened up about another creative risk, her 2003 pop single “Intuition.”
“When I wrote Intuition, which was like me going pop, I was like, ‘I wonder if I can make a pop hit that isn’t about love in any way, shape, or form, but about something different, like my intuition,'” she said. “And that was like a real challenge, because as you look at pop radio, you’re like, ‘How many pop songs are not about love?’ Very, very, very, very few, and so that became like this really like this needle to thread that I found really interesting, and like really difficult, of like, can I write a pop hit, and can it be about not love, just about like, how’s my community doing? How’s my world doing? How am I doing inside my body that isn’t relative to a man or a relationship?”
While “Intuition” marked a major departure from her known folk style of music, it went on to also enjoy Billboard chart success on both the Hot 100 list and on the dance music chart, according to Billboard.com.
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